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End executions. Now

An Oklahoma death row inmate died of a heart attack Tuesday night more than 40 minutes after his execution was halted because the lethal injection of three drugs was botched. Now death penalty opponents are demanding change.

Reliably deadly drugs are no longer available. States are improvising, using untested combinations cobbled together from who knows where. And so the condemned lift their heads and mutter "man" after they're supposedly unconscious. They exclaim, "I feel my whole body burning." They writhe for half an hour or longer as they die.

Death penalty proponents say it doesn't matter. These people should have suffered before they died, just as their victims did.

Clayton Lockett, the man Oklahoma tried to execute, is their poster child. His crime is vile: shooting 19-year-old Stephanie Neiman, then burying her alive.

But do we as a society really want to lower ourselves to the level of a Clayton Lockett? Aside from Eighth Amendment prohibitions, torturing criminals does not raise us up. Nor does killing them.

Eighteen states already have rejected the death penalty. More than 20 rarely use it. Only 10 states, Arizona among them, regularly carry out executions. And they are finding it more difficult to find the drugs that kill.

They have a choice. They can end the death penalty. Or, like Oklahoma last week, they can ignore calls for transparency, ignore state Supreme Court orders and rush pell-mell to deliver vengeance. They can make martyrs of despicable men.

A life sentence with no hope of parole would have made Clayton Lockett a forgotten man. Instead, he was in the headlines again, tormenting the Neiman family one more time. They will not soon have peace.

There are other arguments against the death penalty. It allows no opportunity to correct errors. It is arbitrarily applied. Its continued use puts the United States in the company of China and Iran.

They are all strong arguments. But what happened in Oklahoma last week and previously in Ohio and Florida should bring this debate to the end. When prison officials no longer know what will happen when they pump drugs into a convict, it is time to put a moratorium on this anachronism.